Large Language Models: What They Are, Examples, and Open-Source Disadvantages
By Mukesh Kumar
Updated on May 02, 2025 | 23 min read | 1.3k views
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By Mukesh Kumar
Updated on May 02, 2025 | 23 min read | 1.3k views
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Nearly 67% of organizations worldwide use generative AI products powered by LLMs to work with human language and produce content. By 2025, 750 million applications will be using LLMs, with 50% of digital work expected to be automated through apps using these models. Therefore, a proper understanding of large language models can help you secure a job in AI-driven sectors.
Large language models (LLMs) are advanced AI systems combined with deep learning and algorithms to process and generate human-like texts. Some prominent LLM examples include proprietary, open-source, and specialized LLMs.
To understand what are large language models, you need to understand transformer architectures and the training of massive datasets for service automation and content generation. In addition, proficiency in fine-tuning models and integration with cloud platforms like AWS can enhance the operational efficiency of LLM models.
This blog will explore some of the top LLMs and their practical uses that can automate your enterprise operations in 2025.
Large language models (LLMs) are artificial intelligence (AI) designed to process, understand, and generate human language. They enable them to perform tasks like language translation, content generation, and answering complex questions. LLMs are built using neural networks, specifically transformer models, deep learning architectures capable of processing large-scale language data.
If you want to learn essential skills to help you build scalable LLM models, the following courses can help you succeed.
Here’s a comparison of LLMs to traditional natural language processing (NLP) models:
Here are some key milestones in the development of large language models that you must know:
The early milestones laid the foundation for sophisticated models such as GPT-3 and GPT-4, which are now capable of accurately performing complex tasks.
Now, let’s explore how large language models work comprehensively.
Large language models use advanced machine learning (ML) techniques based on transformer architectures. These models are trained on massive datasets typically sourced from diverse text-rich data such as books, articles, and web content. To understand what are large language models comprehensively, you must assess the training process, which involves self-supervised learning, which allows LLMs to generate human-like texts.
Here are some of the key components for LLM training:
Self-supervised learning is key for LLM training, where the model learns to predict parts of data based on other parts, without labeled data. In the case of LLMs, the model predicts the next token in a sequence or fills in masked tokens based on the surrounding context.
Use case:
Self-supervised learning enables LLMs like GPT-3 to produce high-quality articles, blog posts, or creative writing in content generation. The model predicts the next word and phrase based on the context of your provided sentence, ensuring coherence and relevancy in generated text.
Training an LLM requires large, diverse datasets to ensure the model can generalize well across different contexts. These datasets are crucial in helping the model capture language patterns, syntactic structures, and semantic relationships.
Use case:
You can train LLMs on domain-specific texts such as legal texts. A fine-tuned LLM can help you review a contract and identify payment terms, confidentiality, and dispute resolution clauses. Moreover, the model can suggest edits for clarity or compliance with legal standards.
The number of parameters in an LLM determines its capacity to capture complex patterns and relationships within language. These parameters are the internal weights that define how the model processes the input data you provide and generates output.
Use case:
Large language models with large parameter counts can provide personalized content recommendations, such as tailored news articles and product recommendations. For example, if you work in an online news platform, you can use LLMs to analyze users’ past reading habits and recommend articles.
There is a direct relationship between the amount of training data and the number of parameters in an LLM. A model with billions of parameters requires massive datasets to avoid overfitting and to ensure the model can generalize effectively across diverse tasks.
Use case:
An LLM can summarize a lengthy quarterly financial report into a brief overview if you are in a corporate setting. The interaction between large datasets and parameters allows the model to retain key details while reducing redundancy. Your company can see an increase in revenue of 15%.
Training LLMs demands massive compute power, usually provided by GPUs and TPUs. These accelerators enable parallel processing, where computations are distributed across multiple hardware units.
Use case:
In autonomous vehicle systems, LLMs utilize powerful computational resources to interpret sensor data, understand road signs, and generate driving decisions. An LLM on your vehicle’s onboard system can interpret voice commands, integrating language understanding and real-time spatial awareness.
After pre-training on large datasets, LLMs undergo fine-tuning to make them specialized in domain-specific activities. Fine-tuning involves training the model on a smaller, domain-specific dataset, allowing it to adapt its learned knowledge to particular tasks.
Such tasks include:
Use case:
You work for a financial institution in Delhi, where you use LLMs to evaluate the risks of loan applicants by analyzing financial historical data. Fine-tuning LLMs on financial data allows you to accurately assist in credit scoring, fraud detection, and investment recommendations.
Transformers utilize a self-attention mechanism that allows the model to weigh the importance of different words in a sentence relative to each other. It is crucial to understand long-range dependencies in the text you provided.
Use case:
You are working with a news agency where a transformer architecture can automatically classify articles depending on politics or entertainment. The transformer architecture allows your LLM to understand complex text classifications where categorization depends on predefined categories.
Now, let’s look at some disadvantages of open-source large language models.
Open-source language models such as GPT-Neo, BERT, and other pre-trained architectures have become popular due to their accessibility and customization flexibility. However, these models come with notable disadvantages of open-source large language models, such as misuse risks, lack of content filtering, and intellectual property issues.
Here are some of the core disadvantages of open source language models:
Open-source models are publicly available and can be freely accessed, making them vulnerable to exploitation by malicious actors. These models can generate harmful or unethical content without proper controls, such as deepfakes, misinformation, or social engineering attacks.
Effect: With models openly available on platforms like GitHub, there is no centralized oversight, making it challenging to safeguard model integrity. You must deploy additional security measures, often requiring complex integrations with platforms like Docker and cloud environments like AWS to detect misuse.
Example: GPT-2, when initially released, was a perfect example of how the disadvantage of open-source large language models can lead to misuse. After its release, it was used to generate fake news articles, making it evident that LLMs could easily be exploited for malicious purposes without safeguards.
Open-source language models generally lack built-in content filtering systems, which means they can produce biased, offensive, or harmful outputs. These models may generate inappropriate or unethical content without additional safeguards, leading to reputational damage or legal challenges.
Effect:
You must implement complex content filtering systems with tools like TensorFlow or integrate custom scripts in Python to process outputs. This added burden does not exist when using proprietary models with built-in safeguards.
Example:
When you use BERT for tasks like sentiment analysis or content generation, biases tend to be generated. A fine-tuned BERT model for an HR application could unintentionally reinforce gender biases, a disadvantage of open-source large language models when deployed in sensitive fields.
Open-source models are trained on vast datasets scraped from publicly available sources, which may include copyrighted content. As a result, your generated outputs could violate intellectual property rights by mimicking or reproducing protected content.
Effect: Enterprises must implement mechanisms for detecting and preventing unintentional copyright infringement with extra care. You can integrate third-party plagiarism detection software or build custom solutions in Java or Python.
Example: You are working in an enterprise using GPT-Neo for content generation in marketing campaigns. You may find content closely resembling copyrighted texts, which is a clear disadvantage of open-source large language models.
Open-source models generally lack official customer support or comprehensive documentation. Developers rely on community forums, GitHub discussions, or external consultants, which may not always provide the timely and accurate support for mission-critical applications.
Effect: In this context, the disadvantage of open-source large language models is that the lack of structured support leads to longer troubleshooting times. While deploying these models, you must implement this with internal teams proficient in machine learning frameworks like TensorFlow or PyTorch.
Example: You are using GPT-2 for a chatbot integration project where you encounter issues in fine-tuning and scaling. Without professional support from the model's developers, you would have to rely on documentation or community contributions, which may not provide sufficient troubleshooting assistance.
Large open-source models, like GPT-Neo and GPT-2, require significant computational resources to train and deploy. Running these models at scale often necessitates high-performance hardware such as GPUs or TPUs, along with specialized environments for deployment, such as Kubernetes.
Effect: Deploying open-source models on platforms like AWS or managing resources via Docker for containerization incurs significant costs. Small businesses may struggle with these expenses, a critical barrier to large-scale deployment.
Example: Fine-tuning GPT-3 on a specific dataset requires powerful GPU clusters or cloud services, which can become expensive for your company. The disadvantage of open-source large language models is that while the model's code is free, the resources required to deploy them efficiently are not.
Also read: 17 AI Challenges in 2025: How to Overcome Artificial Intelligence Concerns?
Let’s explore some benefits and typical uses of large language models.
Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-3 and T5 have become fundamental tools in NLP, due to their utilization of transformer architectures. To understand what large language models are and their benefits, you must explore complex relationships within texts and prompts.
Here are some benefits and common uses of large language models:
Benefits
Common uses
Also read: 5 Significant Benefits of Artificial Intelligence [Deep Analysis]
Now, let’s explore what large language models are to various examples:
LLM models are classified into proprietary, Open-Source, and specialized LLMs. Each type offers distinct capabilities, such as conversational agents, code generation, or medical text analysis.
Here is a comprehensive overview of some of the large language models examples present in 2025:
Proprietary LLMs are developed and controlled by enterprises. You can access these models through APIs or subscription services for reliable performance.
Here are some proprietary large language models examples:
Source: openai.com
OpenAI’s GPT-3 and GPT-4 are among the most advanced proprietary LLMs, capable of producing human-like text generation, summarization, and question answering. With 175 billion parameters in GPT-4, these models are prominent large language models examples
Use case:
In customer service, GPT-4 can enhance chatbot performance by accurately understanding customer inquiries and providing personalized responses based on historical data. By integrating GPT-4 via OpenAI's API, you can automate customer support, reducing operational costs while increasing customer satisfaction through real-time, intelligent assistance.
Source: gemini.google.com
Gemini is part of Google’s suite of multimodal LLMs, designed to work across text and image inputs. It is highly versatile and optimized for handling tasks that require understanding and generating content in multiple formats.
Use Case:
In digital marketing, Gemini can generate integrated campaigns that combine text and visuals. Using Gemini’s ability to process text and image inputs, you can automate ad copy creation and corresponding visuals, significantly reducing time spent on content production while ensuring cohesive and targeted messaging.
Source: ai.google
PaLM (Pathways Language Model) is a general-purpose LLM from Google designed to scale across multiple NLP tasks. It uses the Pathways architecture to allow better efficiency and model performance.
Use case:
Legal firms use PaLM for multilingual legal document analysis. With PaLM's capabilities, you can automate the translation of contracts and the study of legal texts across languages. In addition, it streamlines international contract review and reduces the need for manual translation services.
Source: anthropic claude
Claude is a series of LLMs from Anthropic designed to focus on safety, ethics, and transparency. These models are built to understand and generate human-like text while avoiding harmful or biased outputs, making a prominent large language models examples in enterprises.
Use case:
Mental health platforms use Claude to provide safe, compassionate, and ethical support through conversational agents. By integrating Claude, you can ensure that AI responses are empathetic and secure for users while adhering to regulatory guidelines and avoiding harmful or biased language.
Also read: 28+ Top Generative AI Tools in 2025: Key Benefits and Uses
Open-source LLMs are publicly available, allowing you to modify and fine-tune the models for specific applications. These models are popular in academic research and industries looking to customize solutions without being locked into proprietary ecosystems.
Here are some open-source large language models examples:
Source: ai.meta.com
LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI) is Meta's open-source LLM, designed for efficiency in NLP tasks. It is optimized for research and production environments, offering competitive performance and lower resource consumption.
Use case:
Research institutions use LLaMA 3 to conduct large-scale NLP experiments in computational linguistics. The platform lets you rapidly train models with minimal hardware investment, especially for specialized research projects like semantic analysis.
Source: mistral.ai
Mistral is an open-source model designed for efficiency and high performance. Mistral 7B is one of its most notable versions. It is optimized for tasks requiring low-latency inference and can handle complex language tasks despite having fewer parameters.
Use case:
Mistral 7B is used in e-commerce platforms for real-time customer support chatbots. It is critical if you are working with low-latency processing to deliver instant answers and maintain high customer satisfaction during peak times.
Source: mistral.ai
Mixtral is an open-source LLM known for being efficient and lightweight while offering high performance in generating text and handling NLP tasks. It is optimized for both resource efficiency and speed.
Use case:
Online retailers deploy Mixtral to handle real-time customer inquiries, where high traffic and immediate responses are crucial. The low-latency feature ensures you for smooth interaction even during peak shopping periods.
Source: falconai.com
Falcon is an advanced open-source LLM designed for both efficiency and performance. It is suitable for a wide variety of NLP tasks, particularly those that require real-time response generation.
Use case:
Falcon powers multilingual customer support systems for global enterprises. It allows you to efficiently interact with customers in multiple languages without needing separate teams for each region.
Source: bloomai.co
BLOOM is an open-source model designed for high-quality, long-form text generation. It is built to support tasks requiring coherent and detailed content, such as articles, papers, and creative writing.
Use case:
BLOOM is widely used in content marketing by agencies and enterprises to automate the creation of detailed blog posts. It also allows you to prepare research summaries and product descriptions, significantly reducing content production time.
Specialized LLMs are tailored for tasks such as code generation or medical applications. These models use multilingual programming with JavaScript and Python for accurate outputs.
Here are some specialized large language model examples:
Source: generaltranslation.com
Codex is a specialized LLM focused on generating and completing code. These models have been trained on large codebases, making them prominent large language models examples for software development and debugging.
Use case:
GitHub Copilot, powered by Codex, significantly speeds up the development process by providing real-time code suggestions. Copilot automatically suggests functions as you write code, completes code snippets, and helps debug issues, making software development more efficient and less prone to error.
Source: codegen.com
CodeGen is a specialized LLM for programming and code completion. Trained on a large corpus of programming languages and repositories, it generates syntactically correct code from natural language prompts.
Use case:
CodeGen is integrated into IDEs like Visual Studio, which assists you by suggesting code snippets, completing functions, and providing real-time error feedback. You can also use it to prototype software faster and to troubleshoot, ensuring an efficient and accurate development process.
Source: medpalm.com
MedPaLM is an LLM designed for medical applications. It provides insights into clinical texts and assists with decision-making based on medical knowledge.
Use case:
You are a medical practitioner in a prominent hospital in Mumbai. MedPaLM can automate the analysis process and provide insights into diagnosis and treatment plans. The system analyzes data from various sources, such as medical records, lab results, and clinical notes, to provide actionable recommendations tailored to individual patient needs.
Also read: Top 20 Types of AI in 2025 Explained
Large language models such as GPT-4, BERT, and PaLM are revolutionizing industries with advanced text generation, natural language understanding, and process automation. These models use transformer architectures and are trained on vast datasets for content generation, multilingual translation, and more.
Proprietary LLMs like Google’s Gemini offer reliable performance, but open-source LLMs like Mistral 7B present challenges in data privacy, misuse risks, and resource requirements.
If you want to stay ahead of your peers with industry-relevant LLMs, look at upGrad’s courses that allow you to be future-ready. These are some of the additional courses that can help expand your AI journey.
Curious which courses can help you gain expertise in LLMs in 2025? Contact upGrad for personalized counseling and valuable insights. For more details, you can also visit your nearest upGrad offline center.
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